Demon Slayer – Episode 21: Against Corps Rules

The longest night is finally over, and there’s nothing like a little hijinks to being you back down to Earth after a pretty intense ending to a pretty action packed arc. Which isn’t to say there still isn’t a lot of peril and danger going on here, it’s just that I’m laughing along with it rather than sweating bullets.

y’know, Tomioka is a very difficult guy to read. He comes across as stoic in the extreme, but seems to place a deep trust in Tanjiro and Nezuko given he is willing to defy slayer crops rules and fight the insect form slayer Kochō in order to allow Tanjiro and Nezuko to escape.

Tanjiro would feel for a flesh eating bacteria if it has a tragic origin story.

It’s difficult to say why he placed so much faith in Tanjiro by sending him to Urokodaki in the first place to train him, and now his flagrant defiance of the rules to protect a demon. But hey, I mean have you seen Nezuko, never before did a little sister demand so much protecting and never actually be in need of it.

Seriously though, maybe it’s Tanjiro’s extreme empathy towards pretty much everything and anything. After putting him through hell and nearly killing him on several occasions, Tanjiro can’t help but cry for Rui as the spider demon finally comes to terms with the horrible things he has done.

There’s some powerful Gifs born in this episode, shame I still can’t figure out how to make them.

I rag on them for being literal monsters every time I write about this show, but Tanjiro’s ability to sympathise and treat them with some tenderness in their final moments is a powerful part of his character. Him demanding Tomioka “please step off him” in regards to Rui’s remains shows this and is perhaps the thing that Tomioka sees in him.

Speaking of which, Tomioka and Kochō’s bickering and battling in part is really cute. It’s nice to see Kochō isn’t just a creepy sadist, but is just a normal sadist as well, seeming to take pleasure in mocking Tomioka for being unlikable. Something that comes to a shock to him apparently, as shocked as this guy is capable of being anyway.

I don’t often praise “acting” in animated characters, but they do some great subtle stuff with Tomioka in this one.

Tanjiro is too injured to escape by himself and tells Nezuko to run for it, who shrinks to escape and becomes the most freaking adorable thing I’ve seen in this show. I swear she’s going to be showing up on my Twitter feed for weeks now.

Elsewhere, Inosuke seems to be having a crisis of confidence. Between him getting destroyed by father and then seeing the very same demon effortlessly dispatched by another slayer. And Zenitsu seems to be over his spider mutation, and is wrapped up like a mummy by the Demon Corps’ cleanup team.

The guys in charge seem to be the children in charge… but this is Shonen I suppose where nobody exists between the ages of 25 and 60.

The episode ends with orders from above saving Tanjiro and Nezuko’s necks, and Tomioka’s face, that the siblings be captured for questioning. Thus a bound Tanjiro is thrown to the feet of what I can only assume is the leadership of the Demon Slayer corps to explain himself.

Honestly, if I were Tanjiro, I’d be kind of pissed about how many young slayers lost their lives in that forest due to their leadership. The kid isn’t above getting angry at people when he’s in the right, so I wouldn’t be shocked if that’s where we end up.

3 thoughts on “Demon Slayer – Episode 21: Against Corps Rules”

Yeah, the demon slaying corps seems to have a few organisational issues. I hope they explain why they seem to be so dysfunctional and seem to design a system that kills off a lot of potential demon slayers in their test and then sends them out without backup while they are still learning which is probably going to get them killed as well.
I enjoyed parts of this episode but I definitely think we could have done without yet another Rui flashback given it feels like he has been dying for weeks.

I was kind of hoping Rui could just die as a horrible mass murdering psychopath. But Tanjiro needed to wiggle his empathy at him, so we needed to show how tragic he had it. An awful lot of these demons are getting “happy” endings in spite of the things they’ve done.

I’m not sure Rui’s gets to count as a ‘happy’ ending. Certainly they turn him into an object of pity (or at least attempt to) rather than hatred, but I think the endings these demons are getting are pretty tragic no matter how you slice it.